9 months’ jail for ex-StarHub staff who exploited IT loophole to avoid charges on phone contracts

SINGAPORE — A former StarHub employee who took advantage of a loophole in his company’s IT system — and pocketed S$15,000 — was jailed for nine months on Friday (Nov 23).

In sentencing Yazid Hafizuddin Abdul Khair, District Judge Victor Yeo said the 30-year-old “abused his position” as a customer service consultant at the telco’s call centre to commit his offences.

“Not only did he not report (the loophole), he saw fit to exploit it for his own personal financial benefit,” Mr Yeo said.

It was evident that Yazid was “motivated by greed”, as the judge noted that his offences were not committed on “a spur of the moment”, nor were they “isolated instances”.

On Wednesday, Yazid pleaded guilty to 12 counts of offences under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act, with 30 other similar charges taken into consideration during sentencing.

The court heard that Yazid discovered the loophole some time in January 2015, when he was handling a customer’s query on penalty charges for early contract termination.

He realised that there would be no early termination charges if he were to reduce the length of the customer’s mobile voice services contract from two years to one.

Instead of reporting the loophole to his supervisor, he signed up for mobile phone plans under the names of his wife, younger brother, and himself.

As a result, he was able to buy mobile phones at lower prices.

Then, he logged in to his work account on StarHub’s customer relationship management system to change the length of these contracts.

In total, he purchased 20 mobile phones at low contract prices, modified the contract lengths to avoid penalty payments, and resold them at higher prices.

In one instance, he bought a new iPhone 8 Plus 64GB, which he got for free last December in signing up for a StarHub XL mobile voice service plan online that cost more than S$200 a month. He later sold the iPhone for S$1,000.

While he earned about S$15,000 from reselling the phones, StarHub suffered total losses of S$22,684, including the costs of phones, the court heard on Wednesday.

Mr Yeo noted on Friday that Yazid's actions went on for a period of three years, until he was discovered by StarHub’s fraud analyst in January this year.

Delivering his sentencing remarks, the District Judge said: “Cyber crimes that are easy to commit, (but) difficult to detect have seen a rise in Singapore. (Their) harm should not be underestimated.”

In meting out the nine-month sentence, he said that the punishment “must be sufficient to deter like-minded persons from committing similar offences”.

Yazid will begin serving his sentence on Nov 30, and is out on bail of S$20,000.

He could have been sentenced to three years in jail and/or a fine of up to S$10,000, for each proceeded charge.